dreams and nightmares, and Leigh Hunt does not think it fit for the Examiner. I wrote, and the critics denounced me as a mischievous visionary, and my friends said that I had mistaken my vocation." At the time of his death there was practically no sale for his works, and his father only acted in accordance with the general sentiment about them when he made the suppression of his posthumous poems the condition of a niggardly allowance to his widow. The very expenses of the publication of his posthumous poems had to be guaranteed by the generosity of private friends. Is it wonderful that Shelley cared little to please a public who at the best studiously ignored him, or reviewers who received everything he wrote with virulent scorn, and were capable of writing after his death, "He will now find out whether there is a hell or not "?

That the poetry of Shelley should reflect the sadness of his life is natural, but it is noticeable that, as he grew older, his mind became more serene and hopeful, just as the violence of his early opinions died away with years, and left him writing an admiring essay on the Christ he had hated as a youth. But it is almost absurd to speak of Shelley as growing old, for he died long, for he had

at thirty. In one sense he had lived lived much, and intensity of life adds age to life not less than length of days. He himself felt this, for only the day before his death, when he left the house of Leigh Hunt at Pisa, he said that, if he died to-morrow, he would be older than his father-he would be ninety. What he might have done had long life been his it is possible only to conjecture. It is certain that, every year he wrote, he displayed more mastery over his own powers, and produced results more marvellous in themselves, and more worthy of fame, than the work

that went before them. But long life was not granted
him; he died with the song on his lips, at the very
moment of its utmost power and sweetness.
On July
8th, 1822, he left Leghorn for Lerici, on a sailing-boat
which he had bought from Byron, in company with
Captain Williams. No sooner had they gained the
open sea than a tremendous squall struck the boat, and
a thick darkness shut her off from the anxious watchers
on the shore. When the darkness lifted the boat was
gone for ever. A few days later the body of Shelley
was found, and in his hand was still grasped the
volume of Keats which he had been reading when
death came upon him. His body was burned, in the
presence of Byron, Leigh Hunt, and Trelawney, on the
shore near Lerici. From the flame the heart was
taken uninjured, and was afterwards given to Mrs.
Shelley. The ashes were buried beside the body
of John Keats, at Rome, in the English cemetery, near
the pyramid of Caius Cestius-a spot so beautiful
that he himself said it may well make one fall in love
with Death. Thus, by the tragedy of fate, within
eighteen months the writer of "Adonais " was laid
side by side with the great poet whom he had thus
commemorated in the most splendid elegy which the
English language possesses. "Adonais is less the
elegy of Keats than the monument of Shelley, and it
is of Shelley rather than of Keats that we think when
we read the prophetic lines:

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.

CHAPTER VI.

JOHN KEATS.

[Born in Moorfields, London, October 29th, 1795. His poems first published 1817. Died in Rome, February 23rd, 1821.]

O

NE of the saddest themes for consideration in the literature of this century is the ill-starred life and early death of four of its greatest poets. Byron died by misadventure, one might almost say, at the very moment when he had begun to throw off the poisonous morbidity of earlier years, and certainly at a time when there was no token of failing powers. Shelley was drowned at a time when his genius had begun to show a magnificent promise of ripening power, and when his early errors had not only been amply atoned for, but were repented and forsworn. Burns, after a long series of misfortunes, died at an age when the latter poets of the Victorian epoch had scarcely put forth their powers. John Keats completes the list of poets of great genius and commanding influence, overwhelmed by misfortune, and cut off in the very prime of hope and achievement; and in many respects Keats' is the saddest history of them all. Byron, Burns, and Shelley, at least, had some recognition of their powers accorded them, and the two first had both ample and generous awards of fame in their own time. But Keats passed out of the world before the world

had in the least perceived the rare spirit which had been in it. Even those who were his most intimate friends, Hunt and Haydon, had no commensurate understanding of the height and scope of his genius; both of them lectured him pretty severely, and Hunt even aimed to instruct him in style. The rare lovableness of the man, his sweetness of temper and simplicity of nature, his straightforward honesty and contagious enthusiasm, they both admired and acknowledged in no stinted terms of praise, but neither the painter nor the poet really perceived the originality and freshness of the genius they admired. As for the outside world, it was both contemptuous and indifferent. The reviews of that day were full of a wicked partisanship, and the criticism was venomous and brutal in the extreme. It was quite enough for the Quarterly to know that Keats was the friend of so prominent a Radical as Leigh Hunt; such knowledge afforded ample provocation for attacking him with every fair and unfair weapon it could lay its hands to. Indeed, it was not so much a matter of weapons as of missiles. Keats was not attacked in fair fight, but was virtually mobbed off the stage. To taunt a young poet with his lowly birth was an offence against every canon of gentlemanly feeling, not to speak of the good traditions of honourable criticism; to tell him to go back to his gallipots and stick to his pillboxes was an access of brutality of which even critics in that bad age were seldom guilty. Byron said he would not have written that article in the Quarterly for all the world was worth; yet even Byron at an earlier period had written to Murray that if he did not get some one to kill and skin Johnny Keats he would be forced to do it himself.

The brief life of Keats is soon sketched. He was the son of a livery-stable man, and was born on the

4

29th of October, 1795, at the sign of The Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, facing the then open space of Lower Moorfields. His father had married his employer's daughter, and appears to have been a man of fine integrity, and with some charm of character. He was killed when Keats was a child, and after a twelvemonth his widow married again. Keats received his education at a private academy at Enfield. For the first part of his time there he gave no promise of anything beyond athletic power; then suddenly his mind seems to have blossomed into life, and he became an ardent reader and student. Spenser was the first poet who fascinated him, and Spenser, who has been called "the poet's poet," was a potent influence to the last. On leaving school Keats was apprenticed to a doctor, and began to study medicine. But he never really took to it. In one of his later letters he says he could never have been a surgeon. He was far too abstracted for the skilful exercise of surgery, and he never could have taken fees. The fact was, his mind was not in his profession, and he soon left it, and began to write poetry. There was a considerable sum of money due to him on his mother's death, and on the interest of this, and latterly on the principal, he contrived to live in a frugal way sufficient for his tastes.

He soon found friends, and the love his friends bore him is very marked and touching. He was by all accounts a youth of singular beauty. Mrs. Proctor said, not more finely than truthfully, that his face was like the face of one who had looked upon a glorious sight. It was a delicate and refined face, with large and sensitive mouth, the eyes a brilliant hazel, the forehead low and broad, the hair auburn, and curling softly; a face which once seen was seldom forgotten.